It is a cliche that truth can be stranger than fiction, but in the 2011 Brillante Virtuoso scuttling case, this may well be true.
Readers can find out in May, when a “terrifying true crime” book about the saga is published by Bloomberg reporters Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel.
Dead In The Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy is coming out through Penguin Random House.
The publisher’s blurb claims that the writers’ investigative journalism has uncovered the truth behind “one of the most brazen financial frauds in history”.
Prepare to find out all about the “intricate web of conspiracy in international shipping, and the unsolved murder that threatened to unravel it all”.
TradeWinds has devoted numerous stories to the case down the years.
In 2019, a High Court judgment in London brought an apparent end to the legal side of the story.
Greek shipowner Marios Iliopoulos was found to have orchestrated an attempted $77m scuttling fraud in relation to the 150,000-dwt suezmax tanker (built 1992), which was hit by a blast in the Gulf of Aden in an apparent pirate attack.
The case stretched out over seven years. And a 50-day trial in London rang up legal costs well in excess of $13m for those involved.
Suez Fortune Investments, the registered owner of the Brillante Virtuoso, said it was disappointed to learn of the judgment and was considering what steps were available for it to take.
Death unexplained
“The court accepted there was no direct evidence of the involvement of Mr Iliopoulos and that the decision was reached on the balance of probabilities,” the company said.
The trial was unable to shed any light on the so-far unexplained death of ship surveyor David Mockett, who was killed in a car explosion in Yemen shortly after inspecting damage to the Brillante Virtuoso.
A UK coroner reached a verdict of “unlawful killing” over his death but it has never been investigated by police.
Mockett’s widow, Cynthia, was a regular visitor to the Brillante Virtuoso High Court trial, but his death was never raised because it was not considered by claimants or defendants to be significant to the case.
The book promises to delve into the dynamics of the supply chain and international shipping, an “old-world industry” that’s largely unregulated, rife with criminality and still the backbone of the modern global economy, the publisher claims.
Penguin Random House said the tome is a “good balance of fantastic storytelling and topical interest”.
There is said to be a “trove” of new evidence about the incident detailed by the authors for the first time.
Campbell and Chellel have talked to Mockett’s family, as well as members of the ship’s crew and witnesses to the attacks.
There is also an interview with the “grizzled detectives turned PIs” seeking to find the truth about Mockett’s death.
In a review of Dead In The Water, Nick Bilton, bestselling author of American Kingpin, said: “Truly one of the most nail-biting, page-turning, terrifying true-crime books I’ve ever read.”
